Some magnetic, mechanically-rotating storage devices, such as some magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), can provide information to a host device to indicate how “healthy” the disk drive is (i.e., its ability to erase and hold data consistently). For example, some magnetic hard disk drives have a Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) feature in which, in response to receiving a number of commands from the host device, the magnetic hard disk drive reports back a number of metrics, such as the amount of storage written, the amount of free space, the temperature of the hard disk drive, and the number of bad blocks. The host device can combine these metrics into a formula to create a measure of how healthy the hard disk drive is.
In enterprise storage environments, some magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) and solid-state drive (SSD) solutions also uses the S.M.A.R.T feature, along with a number of proprietary mechanisms to determine the health of a storage device. Namely, the amount of storage historically written to the storage device, combined with the number of failing blocks as well as historical user bit error calculated from error correction code (ECC) formulae, can be used to determine how “healthy” the remaining flash is on the storage device.
While health status reporting has been used with magnetic hard disk drives and enterprise storage hard disk and solid state drives, there is no such reporting mechanism currently available for consumer solid-state storage devices, such as Secure Digital (SD) memory cards, microSD memory cards, Compact Flash (CF) memory cards, and universal serial bus (USB) devices. Some such devices are able to keep track of when blocks of memory are no longer able to accept a write command and internally mark that block as bad. When there are no good blocks of memory left, the memory device puts itself in a read-only mode and no longer accepts erase and write commands from a host device.